Steve Cohen’s Overflowing Email Inbox

Emerging as a key battle ground in the SEC’s attempt to bar Steve Cohen from the securities industry may be the volume of his email.

Bloomberg News

The SEC last week filed an administrative action against Cohen alleging he failed to properly oversee two traders in his hedge fund, who have separately been criminally charged with insider trading. Both traders, Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg, have pleaded not guilty.

One of the SEC’s key new pieces of evidence against Cohen was an email sent to Cohen moments before he began selling shares of Dell Inc. in August 2008. The email, the SEC says, was “highly suspicious” and “reflected the clear possibility” that the traders that sent it “were unlawfully in possession of material nonpublic information.”

That’s because Cohen gets nearly ten times as many emails as the average business person.

Cohen’s lawyers say he received about 20,000 emails a month and about 1,000 per business day at that time in his life. He didn’t read many of them, even those sent by a “research trader” whose job was to email him possible trading ideas.

“He read only a small percentage of them, which is unsurprising particularly considering that he traded 80 different securities or more in a day, as he did on August 26, 2008,” Cohen’s lawyers wrote. “In fact, around this time period Cohen opened only an average of approximately 11% of his emails generally, and only approximately 21% of his emails from the Research Trader.”

That would mean a business email account gets a global average of 108 emails per day. Put that way, Cohen actually opens more emails than most in a day, even while ignoring almost 90% of them.

The lawyers also go in depth on other reasons Cohen wouldn’t have seen this particular email, including that he has seven computer screens and his Microsoft Outlook sits on the far left under two other programs and shows only five emails at a time.

Still, it’s clear that Cohen isn’t a part of the “inbox zero” crowd that refuses to let unread emails pile up. Maybe he should find time to read WSJ’s Walt Mossberg’s column from last month on ways to “put your inbox on a diet.” Mossberg tried out two apps, Mailstrom and Swizzle, that help one get through their inbox mayhem. He decided Mailstrom was a bit better for him.

It’s unclear if Cohen would agree.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly spelled Mathew Martoma’s first name.